A bill intended to stop kids from developing relationships with chatbots just passed a key hurdle in Congress.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. The Guard Act is a bipartisan bill that would prohibit companies from letting kids

under 18 interact with what the legislation calls AI companions.

Those are AI-powered chatbots designed to encourage the simulation of an interpersonal

relationship.

This comes after some harrowing stories of teenagers who developed relationships with chatbots

and then harmed themselves or others.

The bill just passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I talked about it with Ashley Gold, a senior tech policy reporter at Axios.

This bill from Senator Josh Hawley is basically

meant to keep kids safe online in this new online world of AI chatbots. It doesn't seek to

keep minors from using AI entirely. I think it rules out using AI like in educational context and stuff like that.

But if it's a chatbot that wants to be your friend or give you advice or have some sort of

emotional interaction, that's what they're trying to keep minors from using. So it would ban companies

from providing these AI companions for anyone under 18, which is pretty

broad. And there are some folks that think that it goes a little too far and that there are some

First Amendment issues there. But it's popular. It's bipartisan. And it passed the committee

unanimously. Yeah. Tell me more about the critics. Give me a sense of what they're saying. What I've seen from critics is that, you know, chatbots can be good for children. They can provide emotional support or they can help kids who maybe don't have other resources, you know, or they're worried that maybe chatbot products that are made to help with education or other topics

will be unfairly grouped in with, you know, ones that are banned by the bill, and it will be

too hard to determine what's a companion chatbot, which what is a non-companyant chatbot?

Also, there are criminal penalties for companies whose AI chatbots, as the bill says,

engage in sexually explicit conduct with minors or solicit minors to commit self-harm. So that can be

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